Diamond prices are down 60% since a 2011 high, and they are still falling. It's not all down to lab-grown diamonds, demand is down too, especially in China.
No one can lab-grow gold yet, so its rarity and scarcity protect its value, but that will end too. It's just a question of when. China launched an asteroid touch-down mission this week, which will make it the 4th country/region to do so, after Europe, the US & Japan.
How soon will it be feasible to mine asteroids? Who knows, but a breakthrough in space propulsion might mean the prospect happens quickly when it does. It's possible gold has twenty years or less of being high value left.
The $80 Billion Diamond Market Crash Leaves De Beers Reeling
Would that really help though? Gold is super soft so I think it would need to get frequently coated/plated again
and we already have pretty good and resistant marine paint.
Titanium is very corrosion resistant, not to mention plastics/fiberglass/carbon fiber, as I understand.
But yeah, cheap gold would be be great, just seems to me that the market would more be in e.g. electronics, where both corrosion resistance and electrical conductivity are required (something gold is fairly unique at).
Yeah, well maybe ships weren't the best example.
Low wear resistance of gold is a significant issue, which definitely limits the number of potential applications, but I guess gold alloys could still be useful. For example, titanium has a bunch of alloys for different purposes, some more corrosion resistant than others, while others were optimized more towards wear resistance.
Titanium can also catch fire, which makes it a very tricky metal to use. Putting out a fire like that is pretty much impossible, so if your titanium cladded reactor catches fire, all you can realistically do is try to prevent the rest of the building from burning down. The reactor itself is gone at that point, so all you can do is wish you had paid for the gold cladding instead.
Also, the electrical conductivity of gold is amazing. If gold was as cheap as iron, we would definitely use lots of it in various electrical appliances.
If you can mine gold from asteroids, you're probably also going to find silver and platinum. Those two have some amazing properties too, so I think asteroid mining has great potential to permanently revolutionize a bunch of industries.